When you open a book at the bookstore

We hope your selection contains a Table of Contents. We strongly support a Table of Contents. Even for fictional works.

For you novelists, a Table of Contents can become a selling tool. Shoppers will scan the TOC and gain a good idea of what the book's about and where it's going. More important than most think for fiction.

Here's the TOC from our novel, The Boys of Summers Run.

Chapter 1, The Flight of The Turnip 

Chapter 2, The Rooster

Chapter 3, If We Could See the Wind

Chapter 4, When the Scene Ended

Chapter 5, Mary Anne

Chapter 6, “He's Really Cute!”

Chapter 7, “It's Food and Drink”

Chapter 8, “We're Here and We're Back”

Chapter 9, The Four Horsemen of the Outfield 

Chapter 10, Mr. Standing Ovation

Chapter 11, The Country Gentleman

Chapter 12, Melodies from Memories

Chapter 13, Rivalry with Renata

Chapter 14, Life on the Farm

Chapter 15, The Clan Kinkade

Chapter 16, The Grumbling Hills

Chapter 17, “I Hown Center Field”

Chapter 18, Home on the Run

Chapter 19, Hearing a Bird Sing

Chapter 20, A Day of Pleasant Bread

Chapter 21, Fledglings

Chapter 22, “I Have Wren”

Chapter 23, Little Maple Man

Chapter 24, Halfway Hathaway

Chapter 25, “I Hear Yhou”

Chapter 26, The Morning Song

Chapter 27, Sunbeams

Chapter 28, “Chase Around Brown”

Chapter 29, The Crevices of Memory

Chapter 30, Little League in Meadville

Chapter 31, “And Now Batting”

Chapter 32, Peaches in the Morning

Chapter 33, “Bein' Watched”

Chapter 34, Good Stories

Chapter 35, Roping the Harvest Moon

Chapter 36, Families and Forever

Chapter 37, Between Doubt and Hope

Chapter 38, Bless This House

Chapter 39, Foggy by Supper Time 

Chapter 40, Montana in the Mourning

Chapter 41, Boys in a Balloon 

Chapter 42, “Your Father's Son”

Chapter 43, The Politics of Boys' Sports 

Chapter 44, “Live Where Your Heart Is”

Chapter 45, Return to Summers Run

Chapter 46, “We're Here”

Chapter 47, When It's Magic

Chapter 48, When Baseball Ceases To Be Fun 

Chapter 49, The Time Capsule of Boyhood

Chapter 50, A Class Act

Chapter 51, The Banter of Boyhood

Chapter 52, A Patch of Blue

Chapter 53, Pick Your Magical Place

Chapter 54, Jackknives and Judgment Calls

Chapter 55, Sunbeams in Our Hands

Chapter 56, Off To See The Rooster

These chapter titles listed in the TOC are not just tossed off or given "a lick and a promise."

No, they've been given careful consideration toward enticing the reader to linger and satisfy his or her curiosity. 

What does it mean, "Montana in the Mourning"?  Is that a typo?

How do "Jackknives and Judgment Calls" relate?

Who or what is "Foggy by Supper Time"?

What's The Turnip? The Rooster?

See what we mean?

It's foolish to just list the chapter numbers and pages in the TOC. Some electronic editions won't list the page where the chapter begins. So what's the point, then?

Of what value is such to the reader?

Most readers don't mark a fictional work. If they do, they'll turn down the corner of a page featuring a key or favorite passage. Or place a bookmark there. Or use a pen or highlighter to mark what they want to remember or recall.

Creating a Table of Contents with subheadings or chapter titles serves as a useful reference to readers who wish to find that passage again. It's a signpost, helping your readers retrace their steps through your work. 

It's easier for them to find their pathway back if your Table of Contents contains some memorable phrase or quote. "Oh, yes, something about the moon. 'Roping the Harvest Moon,' that's it!"

POV is . . .

a writerly term for Point of View. Quite important when crafting fiction, especially. When one’s reading a novel, he or she will encounter a POV, sometimes labelled or confused with Voice. Here’s an example of third person POV and following, the first person POV.

“She felt strongly she shouldn’t poke around the study of Miss Manners. Yet, she was sure there were likely private matters squirreled away in those intriguing cubby holes of the roll-top or stuffed in amongst the slipcased files lining the shelves. But, on the other hand, perhaps she could justify just a quick scan of the possibilities.”

“I scolded myself, poking around the study of Miss Manners. Private matters here, squirreled away. Yet, those intriguing cubby holes of the roll-top lured me. Or, perhaps I’ll find some handwritten notes stuffed amongst the slipcased files lining those shelves. What harm, really, from a quick scan?”  

These are written to illustrate the contrast and different degree of impact. Yes, the third person could be revised to lend a greater sense of engagement or immediacy, intimacy or revelation of the character’s inner monologue. Let’s try it.

“She scolded herself, poking around the study of Miss Manners. Private matters here, squirreled away. Yet, those intriguing cubby holes of the roll-top lured her. Perhaps she’d find some handwritten notes stuffed amongst the slipcased files lining the shelves. What harm, really, from a quick scan?”

As noted, the third person becomes more effective as rewritten but must rely on italics to convey interior monologue. Why not just put the passage in first person and eliminate this third person narrator, this voice-over intruder separating the reader and the character? Why not avoid this interpreter who rushes in to explain the character’s actions or reactions? Let the character and readers develop their own communication. Reserve the author's voice for background, not center stage.

I consider first person fiction typically stronger and more effective than third person. The third person narrative risks what’s called authorial intrusion. Author Intrusion wedges itself into the discussion, often disrupting the relationship developing between the reader and the protagonist. (Or antagonist for that matter.)

It’s subtle, but careful and critical readers recognize it and find such annoying when they want to sit across the table and share a cup of coffee with the main or important characters on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis. Do they really want this outsider inviting himself, joining in, sitting down, this author butting in and telling the reader what to think, interpret, understand, suspect, expect?

Here’s something to think about. Would The Great Gatsby or To Kill a Mockingbird create greater impact if written in third person? Would Nick Carraway and Scout Finch plant themselves more deeply in our memory if relegated to some third person status?

The Hand-Me-Down Morning

Not like him to be late. During Irene’s illness and after her death, his pattern became as predictable as the school bus. His light would come on at 6:30; he’d listen to the markets, then “Paul Harvey: News”, put the cat out, and come over for breakfast.

I often invited him to eat with the family, but no, he said. “I’d just as soon come later, if it’s all right. Morning’s a hubbub at your place and they all need y’ then.”

“You wouldn’t be in the way,” I told him.

“I ‘spose.” A familiar phrase our family knew as his real, final, or private decision.

And, the morning became a routine I enjoyed. For the house grew quiet and I would have my breakfast then too, getting better acquainted with the father-in-law I'd known for 15 years.

I snapped off the radio––an intrusion today––and watched his house for some sign. Its windows stared back cold and dark in the frosty light. On such a day, he’d come over and report: “I made me a little fire.” But the chimney stood stark and smokeless as a tombstone against the leaden sky.

I set the skillet off the burner and paced, finally into the front room where I could see the road and Rob perhaps coming back from the lower place. These are the times I wished for a two-way radio system. Then I could reach my husband in town or across the valley.

It became a family joke, Granddad’s war with the phone company: “Dad claims he’d drive ten miles t’ keep from callin’ someone,” said Rob. “I’ve seen him do it, too.”

As a kind of gag gift one Christmas, we kids gave him and Irene a cordless memory telephone. But it became her bedside friend right to the end. “It’s so light and I don’t have to fuss with dialing,” she said, happy for the companionship. After Irene was gone, he consigned it to the hall, and we all knew he regarded her little convenience as another reminder of his loss.

Fruitless to call but I did.

I rang eight . . . ten times and then hung up. Dad would turn the ringer down and made no secret of it.

Nothing to do but check, I decided. Plucking my “going-to-the-mail” sweater from its hook, I started down the walk toward his home, what we all called “The Little House.” Overhead, the sun was struggling to lift a woolly shawl mantling the land.            
      Sunshine, why not? Take the edge off this coolness.

His things were in the storm porch where he left them. He hadn’t gone out. The back door was unlocked as suited folks around here.

The cat froze on the counter when I went in. Then it flew off in terror knowing it had violated one of Irene’s sacred orders. That––“Domino”scurrying to safer quarters––alarmed me: he hadn’t been fed.  
     “Dad?” I asked.

The stillness of an empty kitchen enveloped me. Only the Seth Thomas clock recorded each moment’s passing, a metronome of dread. Maybe I’d meet him in the hall. He slept in the front bedroom and when I started to knock, the door fell open at my touch.

“Da––?”

His bed hadn’t been made. He’d been fussy about such. “Drill sergeant mentality,” he said of the habit.

I tiptoed into the room and edged across the carpet to where . . . I could . . . glance into the bath.

Relieved, I called to him again, loudly this time.

“Up here,” he coughed.

The narrow stairs led to what we all called “The Garret,” a little slant-roofed attic and emergency dormitory. Its sloping floors creaked with the weather and captured every step when the grandkids invaded the family “museum,” as Dad labeled it.

I climbed up and knelt beside him where he huddled over the photo albums Irene tended as faithfully as her geraniums.

“I woke like a shot,” he laughed. “An’ I came up here straight-a-way like these pictures were on fire.”

He turned the book for me to view a color print, faded just a little, showing my Rob and his brother with their roly-poly black steers, coats as glossy as bowling balls. He wagged a gnarly finger at the scene.

“That’s where we started, named them ‘Huff’ and ‘Puff’––remember? ‘Course you don’t, before your time.”

We leafed through the pages of county fair triumphs, the slimy new calves, winter feeding, the cattle drive they staged up on Highway 4. “That girl spent a potload on film. Wish now I hadn’t fussed about it.”

The morning light streamed in over our task. And as its amber glow bathed the dusky leather of his features, I studied him, dimly recording his recitation of the pedigrees and the purebred bulls he’d bought and admired. He was wearing the robe I’d made him years before. It shown threadbare here and there and his hair poked out in wispy spikes of auburn flecks and gunmetal gray. I had to smile when it settled down around me: I'm looking at my husband in 30 years.

“Well––” he slammed the album shut. “These need to go to your place. They’re for the kids to see, part of their past––jam sandwiches and fingerprints won’t hurt a bit.”

Now, it became his turn to study me. “You’ve been hopin’ I’d say that, haven’t y’?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“I knew you’d come to it . . . in your time.” I left him and cradling “Domino” in my arms, I started down the steps.

“Sorry I gave y’ a start,” he called to me. “We’ll be there as soon’s I shave.”

Stoking “Domino’s” silky coat, I looked at him over the boxes and suitcases, the ragged furniture and discards, beyond the remnants of memory and a marriage, across the years, trying to express what the moment meant to me. He waited.

“Looks like a golden morning out there,” I managed. “I’m glad you had your dreams, Dad. We all are.”

Response to Boys as Reluctant Readers

As I scan YA titles and plot blurbs, I find it striking the dominant themes are Alcoholism in the family, Abuse, Addiction, Abduction, and peer Approval, and those are just the "A's." Why would any boy spend time with some female protagonist agonizing over her miseries in such situations? Boys don't want to read about such. I know. I raised four.

Where are the books written today for boys? Who is writing for today's boys?

Comment by James Cotton, author of The Boys of Summers Run.

"The Girls with the Grandma Faces"

“The Girls with the Grandma Faces” were known to travel around and about in their “machines.” Only three drove, however.

My Aunt Bea’s 1939 Plymouth did not qualify as a suitable “machine.” It was but a three-passenger coupe and too old to stretch its tether from Pennsylvania to Montana in that autumn of 1966. Besides, it had no radio, a deficiency Aunt Bea considered correcting. 

“I talked to Mister Lamb about it and he’ll see if he can fit one in. Now that Erie might get an NPR station, I think I’ll try it.” Two other machines were enlisted for the trip west. 

Gladys Teasdale volunteered her pea-soup green Dodge. “The trunk’s big enough to fit eight two-suiters side-by-side.” Irene Waterhouse offered her new Olds, a Suitably Gray ’65 Eighty Eight with front seats that reclined.  

And so with transportation secured, “The Sisters of Sacajewea” set off for Yellowstone, Glacier, and Mount Rushmore on the return. United by the First Presbyterian Church, the Bird-and-Tree Club, the college, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and arthritis, they bundled into the “machines,” four apiece, silently acknowledging this might be their most ambitious and perhaps their last and grandest effort yet. Together.

They’d known each other for decades, some from girlhood. While most were amused by one honest young nephew’s label, the “girls” shared more than grandma faces. Bound by family ties, career and community, hope and disappointment, retirement, resignation, they decided a little folly might do them all “a world of good.” Fanylla Harper, Rebecca Cooper, and my Aunt Beatrice were cousins. Pearl and Gladys Teasdale, sisters. Irene Waterhouse and Virginia Carelton were fixtures at the college. Virginia Fendershot recently retired as the area’s Red Cross Administrator.

Yellowstone entertained them as predictably as Old Faithful. The Mission Range was mistaken for Glacier by one of the girls. They marveled and toured the birding sights as described by the guidebooks, rode the “Jammers,” luxuriated in the lodges, and pledged to paint the vistas of Russell Country when back home.

The arrivals and departures were captured largely by Irene Waterhouse and her “kodak.” Postcard memories were framed by “pleasant weather, though nippy . . . not an anxious moment . . . wonderful colors and wildlife . . . drove there and back, 4,000 miles and more, and not a hint of car trouble.” And, later, whenever my Aunt Bea shared her highlights, no account failed to mention what she called “the Missoula morning.”

“We’d left very early, wanting to reach our Glacier stop before nightfall,” she would say, “and the sunlight was just wonderful, with the sun following us along the river. The trees––we learned they were Cottonwoods––were turning nicely and led us right to Missoula where we tuned in and heard Mozart . . . Mozart in the morning on their national public station there! Oh my. It just set the tone. Both cars stopped for gas and then up the road for breakfast and we made sure everyone found the station.

“And we all agreed: if there’s an NPR station on the frontier of Montana, why can’t we have one back home?”

“The Sisters of Sacajewea” and the grandma-faced girls coasted back to old lives and some to new. Over the years that followed, a couple left the area to be closer to family. Another moved in with a daughter nearby. My Aunt Bea’s “machine”––the black 1939 Plymouth Road King Coupe––was sold to Mister Lamb who had maintained it faithfully all its years, and Aunt Bea settled in to what we call assisted living today. 

Erie did indeed acquire a National Public Radio station much to her pleasure back then. She became a faithful listener and supporter. “One of my treasures,” she’d say, then repeating Missoula’s magic morning from the grand tour. “We were escorted by Mozart one morning and drove to the sun, the next.”

From our recurring series published across our family of blogs and titled, "Aunt Bea's Plymouth." This vignette, an entry in Montana Public Radio's recent short story contest, was written to comply with the station's rule to celebrate its 50th anniversary. 

Late Frost in early April

Robert Frost, the poet, that is. From a biography by Jean Gould, she writes: "Spring flowers, always so slow to come to New England, seemed later than ever the next year.

"When there was still no sign of blossoms at the end of March, he 'made some out of paper and put them down the roads on April Fool's Day.' And if the neighbors saw him strewing the bits of colored paper along the path, he paid them no heed––or if he did, it was just to give a friendly wave, inviting whoever wished to ask just what he was about." ––Jean Gould, Robert Frost, The Aim Was Song.

From the Online Book Club: A review

"One gripe I had with this book is the meandering plot. I am normally a fast reader, but this book took me an unusually long time to finish. Some readers may not mind this, as some of the side stories and passages are absolute gems. 

"This isn’t a book you should race through, as you might with a thriller; you should savor every sentence. The writing is lovely and lyrical. I enjoyed reading the book as much for the author’s use of language as for the storyline itself. The story is quite engaging and Claude is a likeable main character. All of the characters are vividly written, particularly Claude’s friend Tim, who is deaf and an orphan.

"The dialogue is easy to understand, even with the heavy use of rural Pennsylvania dialect. I usually find the use of a dialect distracting, although it was natural and flowing in this case. I felt like I knew these people well and became used to their manner of speaking.

"I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. I wish I could have given the book 3.5 stars. The story will tug at your heartstrings. This book would appeal to anyone who likes to read wholesome stories about country life and boys growing up. Actually, I would recommend this book to anyone who appreciates good writing."

Thanks, Carolyn, for this insightful and accurate review. The Boys of Summers Run is now available through Amazon.com as an e-book or in a softcover edition.

Or, better yet, patronize your local bookstore on the corner. It should be able to order The Boys of Summers Run through its network of distributors including the Indie system. Also, the Kobo platform provides a variety of e-book formats for those of you with tablets and the like.